‘He had his – willy out and—’
‘He tried to force you?’
‘Yes! He was blackmailing me. Last night he caught me and Ivy in bed, and he followed me here and said he wanted money. And the rest. He said he’d tell a Hollywood reporter. I said he didn’t have any proof, and he said that rumour was as good as fact in these troubled times. And he started undoing his trousers and he grabbed me – oh, it was horrible – and I managed to kick him in the privates and find a rock – it was awful, Bart, his thing was sticking up and, oh, it was—’
‘He’s a million years old, Betts.’
‘He’s only sixty or so! Are you going to stop wanting to have sex in fifteen years’ time?’
He looked at the man. Imagined him grunting away, his creaking cartilage and fuzzy grey pubic hair, his – but this was Henry! Certainly there was something unsavoury about him – sneaky, you could say. But that was just what butlers were like; they oozed out subservience almost like religious fervour, but secretly they hated your guts.
‘Imagine it’d been you,’ Bettina was saying. ‘It so easily could have been you. A different place and a different person, perhaps, but it might easily have been you in this situation. And what would you have done?’
He shook his head. He didn’t know.
‘Such a ghastly low-down thing, blackmail,’ she said. ‘It boils my blood. You remember that feeling, as a child? When your parents have this enormous power over you and they dangle things over your head and threaten you, and it’s just not fair, it’s just not fair – you remember feeling that way? That feeling of absolute powerlessness…’ She laughed suddenly, her hands massaging her hair as if lathering up shampoo. ‘Power is everything! Indeed it is.’
He reached for his cigarettes, but they weren’t there – he’d left them on the patio table. ‘What are we going to do?’ he said.
‘We?’
‘Don’t make a thing of it. This affects me too. It affects my whole family.’
She sat down on the stump of a felled tree and took her cigarettes out of her pocket. She threw him one and he caught it, just, between the middle and third finger of his left hand. ‘I was going to kill him. But you’ve thrown the gun away now.’
‘You weren’t seriously going to shoot him.’
‘I might have.’
‘No. You wanted me to shoot him. That’s why the whole song and dance in the garden, coming out with the gun.’
‘Must you always have such a cynical opinion of my motives?’
‘Oh, come off it! I know what you’re—’
‘Granted, I hoped you’d see the gun and follow me.’ She held up a finger. ‘That bit was a manipulation on my part. But I think I was hoping you’d talk me out of it and find another solution that didn’t involve murder.’ She frowned, exhaling smoke through a mouth that was turning downwards at the corners – age. ‘You seem to view me as some sort of devil woman, Bart, and frankly, I’m getting a tad bored of it.’
‘That’s not true,’ he said. ‘You’re the one who thinks I’m a terrible person.’
She shrugged. ‘Well, what does it matter now?’
But it did matter, it really did matter. For years now, he’d been waiting for a moment like this, for something to happen that would knock down the icy wall they’d put up – she’d put up – and force them to hash things out. To bloody well scream at each other, to scratch each other’s eyes out – anything was better than the icy wall. Anything was better than silence. But to what outcome? What did he really want to come out of this? Her apology? Her grovelling, blubbering apology? I was wrong and you were right! Please forgive me, husband! No. He couldn’t have it. ‘I suppose we should wake him up and see what he’s got to say for himself,’ she said. ‘Though he’ll just tell us what we want to hear. “I’ll never tell a soul, I promise!”’
‘So what if he did? It’s just his word. He’s just some disgruntled old butler with a vendetta against his cruel masters. And say he did get in contact with some Hollywood tattler, some Louella Parsons or Hedda Hopper, who’s to say they’d care?’ He laughed, bitterly. ‘I can just imagine the look on Louella’s face. “Who cares about the wife of Bartholomew Dawes? For that matter, who cares about Bartholomew Dawes?” I haven’t made a good film in ten years, Betts. No one will care.’
Bettina had one leg crossed over the other in the man’s style, an ankle resting on a knee, and she was picking mud off her boot. ‘I didn’t want to tell you this at the time, what with things being so bad between us,’ she said, eyes on the boot, ‘but I actually rather liked your last film. In fact, I thought it was your best work.’
The Sins of the Fathers, made in 1940, had been his attempt to break out of the horror mould he’d been poured into. It was a prestige picture set in nineteenth-century Kent, about an aristocratic family mired in various scandals. The film was a flop – ‘a bloated, meandering mess’, according to one critic. It had been hyped as the English Gone with the Wind. But it turned out nobody wanted an English Gone with the Wind, not even the English.
‘You really think so?’ he said.
Her eyes stayed on her boot. ‘Absolutely.’
‘That means a lot to me, actually. Though it would have meant more if you’d said it at the time.’
Her eyes flicked up. ‘Why would I give you praise when you’d had nothing nice to say to me in years?’
‘Well, what about you—’ He raised his hands and closed his eyes. ‘Let’s not do this. You make a fair point. Let’s just…’ He trailed off. Let’s just be friends again, he’d been going to say. Friends? she’d say. Are you serious?
They lapsed into silence. A squirrel jumped from one tree branch to another over their heads, and a leaf fell down, just the one, drifting diagonally in the space between them. A green woodpecker let out its shrill, pulsing call somewhere high up in the trees.
‘Do you want to know something?’ Bettina said. ‘I always imagined it would be you in this situation. Never me. I always thought that one day you’d be caught at it and someone would blackmail you. That’s why – do you remember? – that’s why I was so keen for you to sign with MGM. I knew they looked after their stars when things got hairy.’
She said this – of course – with judgement. She’d never been able to conceal her disdain for his sexual drive. It was hypocrisy. If they’d lived in an alternative reality where the woods were crawling with gorgeous women just dying to get on their knees and – in the immortal words of Roger Stamper – eat pussy, Bettina would spend half her nights creeping from tree to tree, dodging the torchlight of park rangers. Of course she would.
‘We would’ve had to move to the States,’ he said. ‘You’d hate LA.’
‘Maybe I would’ve liked the opportunity to find that out for myself. You never asked me to come with you. There was that film you did with Karloff, the one about the haunted college, and it was shot during the summer holidays when the children were home from school. I remember hoping that you’d ask us to come with you. But you never did.’
‘I didn’t want you to come.’
A cynical hitch of the eyebrows. ‘That’s what I thought.’
‘Oh, come on. I didn’t want the children there, Betts. It’s a poisonous environment, Hollywood. I met the children of the stars and they were always such horrible little shits. And the child stars! They swallow little pills with breakfast and then swallow little pills to go to sleep. It’s just a gigantic fuck-up factory. Why let Hollywood fuck up our children?’ He paused. ‘That’s our job, surely.’